Dateline: Germany— Der Spiegel newspaper reports that police in the southwestern German city of Pforzheim arrested an owl for public drunkenness. “A woman walking her dog alerted the police after seeing the bird sitting by the side of the road oblivious to passing traffic,” police spokesperson Frank Otruba told the newspaper. The common brown owl did not appear to be injured, but officers concluded that the bird was drunk based on his sleepy appearance and the presence of two discarded liquor bottles. “It wasn’t staggering around and we didn’t breathalyze it,” said Otruba. “But there were two little bottles of Schnapps in the immediate vicinity.” The bird was taken to a local wildlife expert for treatment. Police said the bird would be released on his own recognizance once he sobered up. Dateline: England— Nearly two decades after receiving a hair transplant operation, 40-year-old Darren Hope discovered that a doctor had carved a swear word into his scalp. Hope was a balding 21-year-old when he got the £7,000 ($14,000) operation at a London clinic. He recently got his hair cut short. When he removed a baseball cap during a cricket game, pals spotted the word “WANKER” etched into the back of his scalp. The two-inch capital letters were formed by removing the hair roots for transplantation to the top of the skull. “It’s about five inches long,” Hope told England’s The Sun . “I can’t believe I never knew.” The electrician, who is now forced to grow his hair long, told reporters, “I’d love to sue the surgeon, but the clinic has closed down.” Dateline: Florida— Three men arrested in connection with a Silver Springs Shores burglary admitted to mistakenly stealing and snorting the ashes of the homeowner’s father and two pet great Danes. During the Dec. 15 break-in, about $1,500 worth of jewelry, a laptop computer, a DVD player and a 42-inch flat-screen TV were taken. Also missing: urns containing the cremated remains of Holli Tencza’s deceased father and two pet great Danes. Marion County sheriff’s detectives arrested 19-year-old Jose David Diaz Marreno, 19-year-old Waldo Soroa and 18-year-old Matrix Andaluz on charges of burglary and three counts of grand theft in January. Two other juveniles were arrested in connection with the burglary, but their names were not released. The accused burglars told police they thought the containers were filled with drugs and took turns tasting and snorting the contents. “I had no money, so I just did it,” Marreno told the Ocala Star-Banner . “We didn’t know they were ashes. Then we saw the article [in the newspaper]. We wanted to give back the ashes, but somebody robbed the stuff that we stole.” Adaluz later took property crimes detectives to the shoreline of Magic Lake, however, where the ashes of Tencza’s father and one of the dogs were found. Police are still searching for the remains of the second great Dane. Dateline: Michigan— Two ice fisherman called police after they were assaulted by a women wielding a fish. According to the Muskegon Chronicle , two Egleston Township men were fishing from their temporary shack on frozen Black Lake on Jan. 15. There, they were approached by a 29-year-old woman who said she “wanted to urinate on the ice.” Norton Shores Police Lt. Jon Gale said the woman asked the fishermen to “turn their heads while she urinated. While their backs were turned, the woman struck the first complainant in the head with a fish. The female then approached them and struck the other man across the face with a fish.” Words were exchanged and the woman “returned to her shanty.” When officers interviewed the woman, she claimed that she was upset, “because the other men put their shanty too close to her shanty.” The men, both in their early twenties, declined to press criminal charges. Dateline: Texas— A man dressed as a clown threatened to torch a downtown Austin liquor store after the clerk refused to sell him booze. According to the arrest affidavit, 44-year-old Ted Stewart became upset when a clerk at Twin Liquors refused to sell him a bottle of liquor, believing the customer to be too intoxicated. Stewart responded by threatening to kill the clerk and burn the store down. The clerk called police and described Stewart as a “rodeo clown transvestite.” According to the affidavit, Stewart was wearing clown makeup and carrying a Mexican flag at the time of his arrest. Stewart was charged with two misdemeanor counts of issuing “terroristic threats” and public intoxication.
Compiled by Devin D. O'Leary. E-mail your weird news to devin@alibi.com.
